EUROPE: Europe to Allow Two Bans on Genetically Altered Cropsby James Kanter, New York Times March 2nd, 2009European Union governments delivered a blow Monday to the biotechnology industry, allowing Austria and Hungary to maintain national bans on growing genetically modified crops from Monsanto. The market for genetically engineered crops is worth several billion dollars worldwide.

CANADA: The Canadian Oil Boom: Scraping Bottomby Robert Kunzig, National GeographicMarch 1st, 2009Once considered too expensive, as well as too damaging to the land, exploitation of Alberta's oil sands is now a gamble worth billions.
Syncrude and Suncor are two of the largest producers of bitumen; Canada is now the largest importer of oil to the United States, with tar sands exploitation slated to increase rapidly over the next five years.

US: Mr. Whipple Left It Out: Soft Is Rough on Forestsby Leslie Kaufman, New York Times February 25th, 2009The U.S. obsession with soft toilet paper has driven the growth of brands like Cottonelle Ultra, Quilted Northern Ultra and Charmin Ultra. But fluffiness comes at a price: millions of trees harvested in North America and in Latin American countries, including some percentage of trees from rare old-growth forests in Canada.

US: Plant That Spilled Coal Ash Had Earlier Leak Problemsby John M. Broder, New York Times January 8th, 2009The chief executive of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which operates the coal-burning power plant responsible for an enormous flood of coal ash in East Tennessee late last month, acknowledged Thursday that the plantís containment ponds had leaked two other times in the last five years but had not been adequately repaired.

CANADA/IRAQ: Drill, Garner, Drillby Anthony Fenton, Mother Jones November 24th, 2008In the history of the Iraq War, one name is perhaps synonymous with the collapse of the Bush administration's hopes for a post-Saddam world: Retired Lt. General Jay M. Garner, who served as the first post-war administrator. This year, he and a small group of former US military leaders, officials, and lobbyists have quietly used their Kurdistan connections to help Canadian companies access some of the region's richest oil fields.

US: Court Says Shell Canít Drill Near Alaska
by JAD MOUAWAD, The New York TimesNovember 20th, 2008A federal appeals court on Thursday blocked Royal Dutch Shell from drilling oil wells off Alaskaís North Slope after finding that the Interior Department had failed to conduct an environmental study before issuing the companyís drilling permit.

US: PacifiCorp Agrees To Remove Damsby Jim Carlton, The Wall Street JournalNovember 13th, 2008Electric utility PacifiCorp has tentatively agreed to remove four dams from the Klamath River, in a deal that would end one of the West's most rancorous water disputes and could serve as a settlement model for similar fights.

CONGO: Candidates Silent On Resource War In Congoby Georgianne Nienaber, Huffington PostSeptember 25th, 2008All politics is local, to paraphrase the venerable Bostonian and Democratic, Tip O'Neill. To human rights workers, journalists, writers, and humanitarians who have intimate knowledge of the Great Lakes Region of Equatorial Africa, this short email conjures a place, people, and tragedy that has been met with a wall of silence on the campaign trail. Neither John McCain nor Barack Obama has addressed this great humanitarian breakdown, except in the context of political squabbling.

US: Federal Oil Officials Accused
In Sex and Drugs Scandal
by STEPHEN POWER, Wall Street JournalSeptember 11th, 2008Employees of the federal agency that last year collected more than $11 billion in royalties from oil and gas companies broke government rules and created a "culture of ethical failure" by allegedly accepting gifts from and having sex with industry representatives, the Interior Department's top watchdog said Wednesday.

US: Halliburton Ex-Official
Pleads Guilty in Bribe Case
by RUSSELL GOLD, The Wall Street JournalSeptember 4th, 2008In a wide-ranging foreign-corruption investigation, fired former Halliburton Co. executive Albert J. "Jack" Stanley pleaded guilty to orchestrating more than $180 million in bribes to senior Nigerian government officials. The bribes were used to win a contract to build a liquefied-natural-gas plant in Nigeria.